Читать книгу Scolding the Winds - Joel Kelly - Страница 4

Chapter 1

“I’m nothing but a drunk,” she thought.

“No. I’m nothing. And I’m a drunk.”

And then she fell asleep.

Outside, the storm’s wind had pushed the grill a foot or so from the wet, slatted patio wall. Rain had filled the heavy glass ashtray until it spilled over the side and dripped greyish water down onto the rusting metal bistro table.

Water had come in through the slightly open window in the living room. The wind had blown it against the screen until it made its way down onto the windowsill.

Down against the wall.

Down onto the old wooden chest on the floor painted green a year ago. It was a child’s coffin, once. But never used. The coffin was a gift from a family friend who was a woodworker. The order for the coffin had been cancelled.

Riley slept on the couch in the living room with the coffin. Her feet were tucked under the corner of a heavy wool blanket, but the rest of the blanket draped off the brown leather couch into a pile on the dusty hardwood floor.

She enjoyed the sound of the rain against the window, against the roof and walls. It helped her sleep and reminded her of camping with her mother and father when she was eight or nine. Every year they camped on Prince Edward Island in an old canvas tent that leaked if you touched the sides.

So she slept deeply, now, as the water seeped in, more and more.

And it rained in her dream. She was walking toward her office, early in the morning. Too early, too dark. Her auburn hair was getting much too wet. But there was nothing to do about it. She had forgotten her umbrella. Forgotten her coat. But her feet were warm, and dry.

The coffee shop she usually stopped into wasn’t there anymore, in her dream. It had never been very good. They served coffee out of those giant thermoses, some off-brand generic roast, poured halfheartedly into a white Styrofoam cup. But it was on the way.

Now, though, it was replaced with something else she couldn’t see, and didn’t want to.

She tried to walk away, but every step brought her closer. She tried to run, but her feet wouldn’t hold the ground. She bent over, tried to pry at the sidewalk with her fingers, to propel herself forward, but she only went back. Back and back. Toward something like a shard she could feel but couldn’t see.

She felt something pierce her back, carve slowly through her skin. She felt it slide through muscle, wedging in between her vertebrae, sending pain to every corner of her body. The shiv moved so slowly and so deep she could almost hear it.

She listened to herself die.

And then she fell. Down to the ground. Down past the sidewalk and through it. Down into the earth.

Down and down.

She fell until she was traveling upward again through the earth. Toward the sky, toward heaven.

Up and up.

And then she woke.

The boards in the couch were uneven, and the padding had given in long ago. She felt the pressure from its structure against her back, felt the pain of seizing muscles through her body.

She kicked the blanket off her feet and sat up slowly, trying not to move her back too much. She tried not to open her eyes wider than needed, and tried not to hear the rain coming in through the window. She tried to wish it away.

She stood slowly, looked at the window, looked at the wall, looked at the coffin. The lights were on, had been on all night. There were dead moths in the light fixture, but she didn’t know how to get them out. How did they get in? They must have found some gap and struggled through it, only to find an oven, heated by a lightbulb, instead of the moon.

She closed the window and wiped some of the water away with her hand, down onto the floor. If she’d been wearing socks, she would have tried to wipe up the water with her feet. But now she looked down on chipped pink toenail polish, standing in a puddle.

Her curtains were heavy, and pulled to the side, so at least they didn’t get wet. But they didn’t help at all, either. They’d been an apartment-warming gift from her friend Avery, and they were probably the nicest thing she owned. They had a white backing, to keep the heat out in the summer. Riley didn’t like the heat. Her antidepressants made her sweat more than before, and she could never pull off a “glow”—she just looked wet.

She left delicate footprints on her way to the kitchen to get the paper towel. Her father would have been so upset if he’d seen it. He hated footprints—no bare feet allowed on the hardwood— and he hated fingerprints around the light switches, smudges on the mirrors, water left in the sink.

He’d have hated Riley’s bookshelves, covered in dusty DVDs and books out of order, piled atop one another. Whatever had most recently been watched or read shoved back on top of the pile. Loose discs without cases, and dust jackets without books strewn all over. The last movie Riley had watched was Casablanca. She watched it every few days, actually, so it was still in the DVD player. The case for it had been lost long ago.

Her favorite line comes when Rick is talking to Ilsa at the outdoor market near the Blue Parrot. He says, “Why did you come back? To tell me why you ran out on me at the railway station?”

Ilsa says, “Yes,” and Rick says, “Well, you can tell me now. I’m reasonably sober.”

***

Her ex-boyfriend Matt had left her not long after she’d moved into her own apartment. She’d gotten a job at a call center that paid $11.50 an hour. Not much, but enough to get her own place.

It was in a neighborhood on the north end of town. It was small, and cost her $650 a month. It didn’t leave her with much money at the end. Not enough to buy the beer that Matt wanted, or needed, as he’d put it. There was not enough of anything, least of all her own patience, or love.

Not enough love to put up with his screaming at her in the middle of the night, too drunk to sleep, too sober to be calm.

Not enough to keep him with her when the other woman she knew he was sleeping with had more money, more patience, and even cocaine sometimes.

Riley eventually found out (luckily not the hard way) that the other woman had herpes.

So Matt had left one day—packed his things into a garbage bag and slung it over his shoulder. The world’s saddest Santa. He’d told Riley she’d be sorry, told her one day she’d realize her mistake. Realize she should have begged him to stay.

Instead, she was happy about it. She knew that usually those kinds of relationships don’t wrap themselves up so nicely. Sometimes the women get hurt. Often, even. But she was lucky.

She had moved out on her own because her parents had told her she could only stay and live with them as long as she apologized for what she’d done. As long as she said she was sorry for disobeying them, and God. As long as she went before a “Judicial Committee” and repented, and as long as the old men she repented to believed her. She went to the Committee, but she didn’t repent. At least not hard enough for them.

And so her parents had told her to get out. That she had a week to be out of their house, and out of their lives.

They’d found out about Matt. Riley had been spotted holding hands with him by a family “friend” driving by the school one afternoon. Word spread quickly, and the story grew into Riley sticking her tongue into the mouth of a boy right in front of everyone. Defiantly. “Brazen Conduct,” they’d called it, and plain old fornication.

The day she left, her mother cried at the top of the stairs as her only daughter walked out the door. Her father was down in his office, working on something for church the next day.

Riley had found the apartment online. She made a deposit in cash, and moved in, all within a few days.

It wasn’t long before Matt lost his job as a carpet cleaner’s assistant. He hated crawling on his hands and knees picking staples out of the stiff and shallow fabric. He hated carrying buckets of water up six flights of stairs and being told he’d put too much cream in his boss’s coffee. He hated being told what to do.

So he stopped showing up and so did the checks, and then there he was one day, knocking on Riley’s door.

Chapter 2

Riley brought the sheets of paper towel back to the puddle. She had taken too many, she knew. Wasteful, but oh well. She dropped them into the water—she loved watching the water as it was absorbed, the almost conscious capillary action of water traveling through the fibers—and then pressed down, wiping up what remained.

She wiped behind the coffin, on top of it, and up the wall to the windowsill. The paper towel was a dark grey, almost black, now. She hadn’t dusted in . . . she hadn’t dusted.

She brushed her hair out of her face. It was too long now, she thought. She was growing her bangs out. Her stupid bangs. Every time she got bangs she hated them within days and spent the next few months growing them out.

One day, when she was in the fourth grade, she had hated her bangs so much she decided to cut them off. She threw up immediately after she saw herself in the mirror, imagining her father telling her to stick her hands out so that he could slap them.

She found a headband, wore it every day and every night for a week, and somehow got away with it.

Until one night it slipped off while she was sleeping and her father came in to make sure she was asleep. He saw the bald patch above her forehead and started yelling.

“Riley!”

She stirred and woke up and knew right away what was wrong.

“I have cancer!” she found herself yelling. “I think I have cancer. It just fell out,” she said through tears and sobs.

She got her hands slapped so hard and didn’t find out for years why he hadn’t believed her.

Some days she still wished there were an easy way get rid of them. But now she had to grow them out until they were the perfect length to get in her eyes and in the way. There’s never an easier way.

She gave up drying the rest of the water even though she knew clean patches would just make the rest of the apartment look more dirty.

Chapter 3

Riley worked in advertising now, going on a year. She got hired at an agency after working at the call center. She was an account coordinator, which meant she did all the work that no one else wanted to do. From scheduling calls with clients to getting coffee for meetings and writing responses to RFPs that would get dropped on her the day before they were due.

She liked it, mostly. The hours were long, the clients were difficult, but the people she worked with were fun, except for the ones she hated.

Like Wendy. Well, hate was a strong word, and an emotion she rarely felt. She didn’t really have the energy for grudges or strong emotions of any sort. The antidepressants helped with that, too.

Wendy was just so . . . Wendy. Always put together. With hair pulled back so tight it stretched her skin, and glasses that made her look both smart and obnoxious at the same time. At office parties, she would leave her hair down and she wouldn’t wear her glasses and yet she somehow looked more professional. More awkward, too.

She was classically pretty, with long blonde hair, a small, almost sharp nose, and long runner’s legs. She was tall, too, at least two inches taller than Riley, who was only five-five.

She wanted to like Wendy, or, rather, she wanted to be liked by Wendy. She was clearly some arbiter of taste, in the office at least. If you looked like Wendy, talked like Wendy, you ended up on projects with Wendy. And those projects tended to go very well. In the agency, your reputation was as good as your last project. Or as bad.

Wendy seemed to be nice to Riley, actually seemed to care about her. But to Riley it always felt like pity. Like Wendy knew she didn’t belong there and just wanted to help her survive. Riley had gotten the job mostly through luck. In her parents’ religion, you weren’t supposed to go to college. So she hadn’t. But she was smart, and she worked hard and lied.

Wendy didn’t need to lie, because she had gone to college. She had gotten the job experience she needed. She had put all the work in, and checked all the boxes. And that made Riley uncomfortable—to be around people who did all the right things—because she never got the chance.

Riley had responded to a job ad for an account coordinator, and so she’d told them she’d been a freelance writer, which was only sort of untrue. She had a blog, with a friend, about books and movies. It didn’t generate any money, but it did give her writing samples she could use in her application.

Luckily, they didn’t look into it any more than that.

So she’d been hired, and by the time they’d figured out she was too young to have been to college, and too inexperienced to know what she was doing, it would have been more trouble than it was worth to fire her and hire someone else. So there she was, working at her first “real” job, and doing it well enough to not get fired, which was more or less what she’d always aspired to do.

But not long after that her depression and anxiety got worse. She started drinking more, and her friend Avery told her she had to go to the doctor. Avery and Riley met at an awards show for local advertising agencies not long after Riley got her job. Riley got too drunk, and Avery found her in the bathroom and helped her get home. Since then, they’d been friends, close friends. Avery was always looking out for her, like a sister might.

So nine months ago, after working for the agency for about three months, Riley described the way she was feeling to her doctor. She had told her that every small thing in her life made her sick. That she’d thrown up at the idea of seeing a doctor, and then once again on the way to the appointment. She’d told her doctor that going to a movie with a friend would give her panic attacks. What if they didn’t make it there on time? What if she was too early?

Her doctor had said, “Have you ever considered medication?”

And Riley had said, “Every single day.”

The antidepressants helped her function, helped her control her reactions to emotion and anxiety. It was all still there, just on a leash instead of tearing through her mind and breaking her down.

She kept asking for higher doses until her doctor said Riley was now taking as much as she was allowed to prescribe. Riley decided to be okay with that, and figured it was the pills that let her.

***

She met her friend Laura at the call center. Laura worked at the station beside her, inside the same cubicle. Cubicles occupied a whole floor of the office building. A vast and depressing sea of grey. Ringing phones and keyboard clicks, and the din of hushed conversations between calls.

It was an inbound call center. People called to dispute charges on their credit cards from things they didn’t remember signing up for, and sometimes they’d been signed up for years. The call center’s clients were businesses that didn’t seem to provide any service, just websites that you’d accidentally sign up for if you said the wrong thing while buying calling cards or coupon books off the TV. They might say something like, “Would you like to receive hotel rewards in the mail?” and if you said yes, that meant you’d get charged ten dollars on your credit card, every month, until you noticed.

Riley’s job was to listen to these people yell and scream and say their wives would divorce them if they didn’t get the money back. They’d plead and say it was an accident and they really needed the money, that’s why they were buying coupon books and discount calling cards. And Riley would say, “I understand your confusion, but you signed up for the program. We can cancel your subscription, but we don’t offer refunds.” And they might cry or yell or put their husband or wife on the phone to try another angle.

All Riley could do was enter a “support ticket” and promise someone would call them. No one ever would.

She hated the job. It made her sick to get yelled at all day, to be threatened, to listen to people cry. Laura was good at it, though. She enjoyed it. It was an easy job just saying “uh huh,” “yes,” “I’m so sorry to hear that,” over and over again all day. And then she’d write out her notes, submit a ticket, and wait for the next call.

She’d try to remind Riley that they were just voices on the other end of a telephone, that they couldn’t hurt her. Matt had left a few months into the job, and now that she wasn’t supporting him, Riley was hopeful about the future and able to save a little extra money. But it felt like the job was killing her.

She and Laura would go out for lunch, to the KFC across the parking lot from the office building, and eat popcorn chicken and share a Pepsi and stories about recent calls. One caller was a young man, from somewhere in Texas, who offered Riley a brand–new truck if she would send him their list of contacts. She didn’t do it, but she liked knowing she had access to information people would pay for. She was young, but in charge of something important.

After Riley quit the call center job to start working at the agency, she and Laura stayed in touch. Laura had gotten a promotion and was now managing the floor. She was only twenty-two, so it was a big deal. But she was good at it, and kind to her team.

“Just remember,” she’d say about the angry people who would call them, “they’re not real people like you and me.”

Chapter 4

Riley walked down the hall toward the bathroom. She could now feel the dust and dirt collecting on her wet feet. Where did it all come from? She knew where the long brown hairs came from, but what about all the long grey fibers that collected in the corners of rooms? She didn’t have a pet. Was animal hair just in the air all the time, and in her lungs and in her food and in her ears and mouth?

She tried not to think about it.

She pulled her tattered sweatpants down to her ankles and sat on the toilet. She thought about the small bottle of Jameson she kept in the drawer under the sink. She thought about opening the drawer, slowly, and seeing the green glass shape filled with golden liquid. She thought about unscrewing the cap with the swift and automatic motion she’d perfected. Just one flick of her wrist and it would spin all the way off.

She thought about bringing the bottle to her dry lips. She thought about the droplets of alcohol that would collect on the edge, touching the small split in her bottom lip that had formed in the night. She thought about the whiskey mixing with the blood, and the pain she’d feel and find herself enjoying.

She thought about tipping the bottle back, letting the cool liquid fall into her mouth, and feeling the tingle as it combined with the saliva on her tongue. She thought about holding it there, for a moment, letting her taste buds touch and tease it. She thought about swallowing it, feeling it run against her throat.

She thought about how much better she’d feel as she felt her body absorbing the alcohol. About how much easier it would be to get in the shower, get dressed, and go to work. With just a taste. Just enough to tell her brain there’s more where that came from if you help me get through this.

But she didn’t open the drawer. Somehow, she kept it closed. It was her morning ritual now, her first test of the day. If she could pass that test, she could do anything.

She flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and then looked into the mirror. The stud in her nose was dull, and she wished it still sparkled. Her skin was pale and untanned, but healthy-looking. She wanted to be pretty, and some people said she was, but she never saw it. She just saw messy hair and tired eyes.

She arrived at the office late, as always, but it was better than getting there on time and spending the whole day tired, or hungover, or wanting to spend it all on the toilet. Better to recover from the night before at home, even if it made her a few minutes late.

Most of her colleagues were already at their desks, spread out across the long, open space. Her desk was at the opposite end from the door, so everyone always knew how late she was. But she didn’t care. They also knew she was the one who was there latest, most evenings, and in on the weekends.

She hadn’t washed her hair and hoped it didn’t smell too bad. Recently, she’d noticed that even if she showered, people could still tell if she’d been drinking the night before. Was it her hair? Where was it coming from? Just seeping, slowly, out of her pores? What was the ABV of her sweat?

The forty or so employees sat at desks with awkward quarter-length walls between them. Not quite cubicles, not quite giant flat desks. Just little plastic walls, like table tennis nets, separating each other.

You could hear everything and see everyone (from the eyebrows up, at least). So, of course, it was always quiet, except for when it was agonizingly loud. Not a hum, like in a normal office, just high peaks and deep valleys of sound.

It was never not distracting.

Right now, her shoes were click-clacking on the smooth, cement-like floor. She was wearing flats, but their hard soles made her sound like a tone-deaf tap dancer. She wore tight black jeans with a white blouse and a chunky turquoise necklace. Her hair was up in a messy bun.

Her brown leather laptop bag was slung over her shoulder, banging into her thigh with every step. She smiled at everyone she could feel looking up and smiling at her, but she kept looking toward her desk with a practiced confidence that really wasn’t.

Riley’s desk was full of loose papers. Before she unpacked her laptop, she gathered up all the papers and put them into a drawer. She couldn’t work with a messy desk, but she couldn’t be bothered to do any real cleaning. This was enough.

After setting up, checking her e-mail, and drinking her first of many coffees, she started proofreading the RFP response she’d written the day before. It was full of mistakes, typos, and sentences that just dropped off without completing a thought.

Her first drafts could be rough. Her mind wandered, and she couldn’t always type fast enough to keep up with her thoughts. Other times, she couldn’t think fast enough to keep her hands busy, so they just typed on, stringing nonsense together. But she would keep working. Keep polishing. Keep trying, harder and harder, to prove she could do this, and do it well. And, so far, it seemed to be working.

By lunchtime she’d convinced herself that she didn’t need a beer, so she stayed at her desk instead of going across the street to the pub. Her office crush was still at his desk, too.

The large open space was mostly empty now, with some people having gone out for lunch, and most of the others in the kitchen, eating what they’d brought from home at the long table. For Riley, though, it was just him and her. Just the two of them in this cavernous space. This cement cathedral. She could hear him typing. She could hear the wheels of his chair move across the floor when he shifted his weight.

She wished she could smell him. What would that be like? She had never gotten close enough to find out.

He’d rolled up the sleeves of his navy blue shirt. His forearms looked strong, like in another life he’d cut down trees or maybe he just went to the gym. He kept brushing back his hair with his hand, out of what looked more like frustration than style.

She wanted to see his eyes, but he was staring at his screen.

Until he wasn’t.

Logan looked up from his computer and met her stare across the empty desks.

Riley looked down as fast as she could. She knew it wasn’t fast enough.

His green eyes had met hers.

She wondered if she should quit.

Chapter 5

She made it the rest of the day without looking at him, or without him noticing, at least. She spent the bus ride home trying to wish the day away. Trying to turn the nauseating churning in her stomach into her more familiar and welcome pain. Something to distract her.

Of course, it wasn’t a big deal. Of course. Of course. Of course.

Keep reminding yourself of that. Keep saying, “This isn’t a big deal.” It was just a look. He doesn’t know why you were looking at him. He doesn’t think you were looking at him like that.

Her bus stop was about ten minutes away from her apartment. It was a gentle walk, flat in a city of many hills. She liked it, usually. It helped her organize her thoughts, figure out what she wanted to eat, and listen to a little bit more of whatever audiobook she had on the go.

Today, it was David Sedaris. He was telling a story about his boyfriend Hugh walking too quickly when they were on vacation together and losing him in the crowd. It made her wish she had someone to lose.

She didn’t miss Matt, but she did miss having someone to look after, someone who might, on a good day, want to look after her.

She didn’t miss her parents. But she knew she missed out on having parents.

She missed out on what families are supposed to be. That feeling of I’ve got your back no matter what. What was that like?

Did she really have a crush on Logan at work, or did she just want to have someone look at her like they were worried about her? Did she just want someone to get home from work, see her passed out on the couch, and carry her to bed?

Did she just want someone to wake her up at night, to free her from another nightmare?

She wondered if maybe that’s all a crush really is.

***

The old family minivan was navy blue, the paint on its hood mostly chipped off, though her dad had often tried to spray-paint it all back together.

Riley was ten years old and going door to door with her father and two others from their congregation, trying to teach people about the Bible and leave them with literature. The other two were an elderly couple who had been in the congregation since well before Riley was born. She had known them her entire life, but she didn’t like them. They always seemed to correct her whenever she said anything, even if she was just asking a simple question.

She had gone door to door for as long as she could remember, ringing doorbells as soon as she could reach them.

They approached a long, faded yellow building alongside a busy road that headed toward the city’s oil refinery. The elderly couple had walked around to the front of the building where there were two apartment units. Through a side door Riley and her father entered a long hallway filled with cigarette smoke and leading to four or five doors to other apartments.

They walked to the end of the hallway so they could work their way back. Riley was wearing an ankle-length tan skirt and dark brown flats. Her loose green blouse was tucked in messily and several stray hairs stood out from her butterfly hairpin.

Her father put his hand on her shoulder, and she knocked lightly on the door. She waited, part of her hoping no one was home. She was excited to give people the magazines she held in her hands, but worried they would be mean. Sometimes people would slam the door or laugh at her. Or raise their voices at her father, or at whoever she had come to the door with.

These people were “goats,” she knew. Nice people were called “sheep.” Jesus was interested in sheep, not goats, for his flock.

Her father whispered, “Louder,” and so she knocked harder, her small knuckles hurting, slightly, from the impact with the red metal door. She heard footsteps and her stomach seized.

She heard the deadbolt click, and the door opened a crack. A woman about Riley’s mother’s age with yellowing hair looked out at them.

“What is it?” she asked, looking at Riley, then her father, then back and forth. “What would you like?”

Riley smiled at her and raised her head and tightened her fists around her magazines. “My name is Riley,” she said, “and I’m asking you and your neighbors today if they know what God has said about His coming paradise.”

The woman began to smile as she opened the door wider and the source of the cigarette smoke became clear. Riley tried not to cough.

“No, I don’t know,” she said, smiling up at Riley’s father. “What does He say?”

Riley excitedly unrolled the magazines that were now wrinkled and creased and showed the cover of the first one to the woman. “This magazine will tell you what God has promised for the future in the Bible. That one day sickness will be gone and everyone will be happy. I would like to leave them with you,” she said.

“Oh, sure,” the woman said, holding out her hand.

Riley held out the magazines, and her father said, “You know, we’d like to come back, maybe in a few weeks, to see how you found those.”

“I’m not sure,” the woman said, her smile fading. “That’s okay.”

“Well, if we’re in the neighborhood, maybe,” Riley’s father said.

“You have a good day,” the woman said to Riley, and then she closed the door, pushing more smoke into the hallway.

Riley and her father walked toward the next door. “Don’t forget to ask them if you can come back,” he said. Riley nodded.

Her father made a note in the book he kept in the pocket of his suit jacket.

Riley could hear people talking in the apartment before she knocked on the door. She rapped loudly, but quickly realized she didn’t have any new magazines out. Before she could fish them out of the bag slung over her shoulder, the door had opened wide.